Settling In/ Presence of the past/ It's MINE!

Gretel created Settling In during her Victoria University Solo Performance Residency in 2012. She researched colonial era massacres of Aboriginal tribes (some barely a century ago) in Victoria's Western districts and explored the impact of inhabiting these sites upon her physical and emotional body. This work was performed as a work in progress as part of Dance Massive 2013, and fed into Gretel's subsequent works Presence of the Past (2013, Melaka Arts Festival, Malaysia) and It's MINE! (Hillscene Live Arts Festival, Burrinja, 2014)

It's MINE! :A mash-up of disorderly and sometimes disturbing embodied images, this is a meditation (to loud discordant music) upon white Australians’ sense of ownership of this country. It involves skulls, rubbish, chalk drawing on the floor, brokenness, passionate longing to belong, obscene gestures, jittery movement, Miranda from Picnic at Hanging Rock, still positions in relation to the earth, crying and an Australian flag bikini. All in 10 minutes. This is a crazy piss-take of my own very serious research into body, place, identity relationships in Australia. At the same time as being crazy and funny, it is also drawing upon all of that research in a quite serious call for white Australians to remember that we are thrashing about on land we forcibly took, whilst presuming to have the right to tell any other would-be arrivals where to go (ie. not here!).Photos by Pixelwhip